“...Details as to cause of death remain unclear,” the voice continued. “But it is thought she was killed by a faction of her own people who rose up against her leadership in the wake of the incident in Delhi last month...
“...Still another group blames Syrimne for her murder, but so far, no evidence has surfaced to support this theory, either. Although they were both present for the bombing in Delhi, it is still unclear whether they were working together or fighting on opposite sides. Rumors of both estrangement and alliance have surfaced since the incident in D.C. earlier this year...”
Jon felt Dorje’s eyes on him from the driver’s side once more.
That time, he didn’t meet the seer’s gaze.
THE EASTERN EUROPEAN infiltrator kept his voice low, looking nervously at Wreg right before he glanced back at the suite’s bedroom.
“...He won’t take any food. I don’t think he can, sir...” The seer’s gold-colored eyes held a frozen thread of fear. “Sir, I don’t think...”
Wreg waved him off, not wanting him to continue.
“Get out of here,” he said.
He frowned at the bedroom door after the other left, fighting back a reaction in his light as he tried to think through what to do next. They didn’t have to move him immediately, so Wreg opted to stay where they were, in a hotel in Amritsar, India, where their plane had landed only a few days earlier. He didn’t see any point in trying to chase the Seven now.
They could do it after...when the boss had finished with this thing, this horrible end they had left for him.
Wreg knew that he, himself, still suffered from denial on this.
Shock maybe. That the fuckers would have gone this far. That they would have taken out an intermediary being...only to take out another. He should have had the Bridge taken hostage in Delhi. He could have ordered it himself, told the boss it was a requirement for security reasons. It would have been the truth. He knew that, even then; but he hadn’t wanted to interfere.
Hesitating another beat of time, he pushed open the bedroom door.
He glanced around the heavy, painted wood to see inside.
The room was dim, lit only at the lowest setting by the two lamps on either side of the bed. Blankets lay in a pile on the floor. Even the silk sheets crumpled just past the edge of his bare feet. Someone had drawn the curtains—heavy, embroidered drapes with a Middle Eastern pattern to them. A couch stood in the corner, along with a low table beneath it, still decorated with a tray of Turkish coffee, something like two days old now.
Those details, along with the embroidered wall hangings and hand-woven rugs were all that remained to remind Wreg of the flawless setting it had been when they arrived.
The Sword lay on the bed, sweating.
He looked like he’d sweated off a third of his weight already.
He gripped one edge of the mattress with long hands, and when Wreg saw his face, he flinched, seeing the pale eyes glowing an emerald green. Pain glimmered out at him, cutting his breath, even standing more than a dozen feet away.
He withdrew slightly, made nervous by the charge he saw in the Elaerian’s light.
Even as he thought it, a bulb in one of the table lamps exploded, shedding glass in a halo of powder. Some of it hit the Elaerian’s arm, making tiny nicks in his skin.
He didn’t flinch, didn’t seem to feel it at all.
“Gods be damned,” Wreg breathed. “Fuckers...”
Steeling himself, he walked to the bed, sitting down beside him.
“Nenz,” he said, soft.
He rubbed the man’s shoulder, trying to reach him.
“Nenz...come on, friend. We need you...we need you to go after them...”
Pain contorted the other’s features. His eyes closed, as if to block it out. It only seemed to worsen though. Even as Wreg thought it, the pain billowed out at him again, along with enough grief that Wreg got lost in his own light.
He felt his fingers tighten on the other’s shoulder.
“Nenz,” Wreg said. “My friend. I am so sorry...”
The Elaerian’s gaze met his, his eyes narrow, but Wreg had his doubts he could hear him much, if at all. Pain still hardened his features.
His skin looked almost sallow as he pressed his face into the mattress, as if trying to feel something, anything but whatever crawled over his skin.
The only thing he seemed to respond to at all was the hand on his shoulder, and that response resembled a kind of lost frustration, more like a reminder of lack than any real comfort in being touched.
Hesitating a second longer, Wreg removed his hand.
He considered trying to talk to the Elaerian again, to see if he could reach him. Although, truthfully...to say what, he had no idea. Perhaps he should keep trying to touch him...hold his hand maybe, give him some bare feeling of contact. An expression of empathy, anything.
A moment later, though, he thought better of it, seeing the light in those eyes spark brighter.
The reality was, he couldn’t help him. He couldn’t ease things for him in any way. The man’s mate had died.
He would die, too. It was just the way of things.
All they could do really, was stay with him until it was done.
They could avenge him when it was over.
JON STOOD ON the warped wooden deck outside of a youth hostel.
The hostel itself, a converted house of four stories, stood at the base of a hill directly below a monastery located on the far outskirts of the city of Kathmandu, Nepal.
He could almost be back in Seertown, with the prayer flags strung from the rooftops and the views of snowy peaks and scattered clusters of high-altitude trees and tile-roofed dwellings. He’d even glimpsed a few of those tawny monkeys in the trees near the lower part of the city, chattering at one another and stealing food from vendor carts and open windows.
It felt almost homey to him, which would have come as a surprise to him even a few months ago, before everything happened with Revik, and before Allie got abducted by Terian.
He didn’t know why he was still there.
They’d left him with money and clothes...even a way out, if he wanted one...meaning a way back to some semblance of human civilization that approximated what he’d known for more than thirty years before all this. Not the States, of course...Jon couldn’t travel incognito there easily, given who Allie had been...but maybe Europe or Australia. Even South America would have been closer to his old stomping grounds than the seer-dominated tracts of central Asia.
Cass and her seer boyfriend, Baguen, were staying at the hostel, too, but they were already talking about crossing back into India, maybe heading for Kasmir or Pakistan, or even Shimla in the Himalayan foothills where a number of seers still lived.
The Nepalese seers, according to Cass, didn’t like humans much.
Jon had noticed that the local seers pretty much kept to themselves. They wanted to distance themselves from the unrest in India and Europe, which he supposed made sense, given how concentrated they were in Nepal and the southern part of China, and how relatively untouched by the broader human world.
Still, Jon didn’t quite get how they thought they could remain neutral, since the roads leading through Kathmandu itself still formed some of the major trade arteries for seers being transported out of China. Being neutral meant picking a side these days, anyway...Revik’s band of merry cutthroats seemed to think so, anyway.
Although that might change, too, if Syrimne died.
Jon couldn’t bring himself to latch on to Cass and Baguen as a ticket out of there. He loved Cass, but she moved in her own little orbit these days.
He didn’t admit it to himself fully, but he was waiting for Dorje and Balidor to return. The problem was, he had no idea if they would. There’d been no word from anyone since they’d parted company outside of the human city that lay an hour south of Seertown.
The rest of the seers seemed to be waiting, too.
They’d set up camp in the mountains ab
ove the youth hostel, mostly in the old monastery itself. Local seers had taken the monastery over a few years previous, converting the bulk of it to living quarters for a small settlement of their religious scholars. They’d accepted the seers flying under the Adhipan’s flag, and by extension, all those seers traveling with them. The name of the Adhipan still carried weight in most parts of the seer world, from what Dorje had told him. They had been protectors of the seer “soul” for thousands of years, what Jon jokingly referred to as the “Jedi” of the seer world.
Balidor, being Balidor, had taken the comparison seriously of course. He’d told Jon that their charter was a bit more specific, and then went on to talk about the possible historical influences of both, as if they were somehow comparable in a meaningful way.
The Adhipan seers had Feigran up there in that monastery, too. They’d left him in a stone and mud cell, probably still talking to himself and switching between personalities as he traced patterns on the walls with his fingers.
Jon was told he could visit them there, but that they didn’t want humans spending the night. Given his complete and utter inability to pose a threat to them of any kind, it was unclear to him why the rule existed, but he’d hardly been in a state of mind to argue.
Anyway, with Allie gone, he meant nothing to them now.
Less than nothing, as Balidor had said.
He was unsure what to do with himself, even in the short term. He found he was having trouble thinking lately. Not just thinking; he was having trouble focusing on anything...even things right in front of him.
He still couldn’t get his mind around what had happened in the basement catacombs of the Old House on the Hill in Seertown. He felt like a part of him remained trapped there, in that room beneath the stairs, still only halfway through whatever had happened in that last hour.
He’d heard Allie and Balidor arguing.
He’d heard things from each of them that made a lot of sense.
Allie had been surprisingly clear about the Revik thing, despite how hard it must have been for her to hear what he wrote in that letter.
Jon also didn’t believe the letter to be pure manipulation, at least not the way Balidor did. He knew Revik, and he knew the letter was likely to be essentially what he’d claimed it was, an attempt to humble himself to Allie in the hopes that she might soften after their blowout in Delhi.
He’d been surprised at the wording of it at first. The formality made it sound like something from the past. But the longer Cass read, the more he’d heard his friend in the words, and especially in the feeling behind it. He’d verged on desperate-sounding, Jon thought, despite what Balidor said. Her fury at him in Delhi seemed to have penetrated whatever odd cockiness Syrimne maintained around the two of them before that time.
Even so, Jon himself had been leaning towards Balidor’s take on things.
Maybe because Jon could think of fewer reasons why the infiltrator might skew the truth for his own purposes...maybe because, sincere or no, Revik still seemed to be heavily deluded in terms of what he thought the “problems” were between Allie and himself. Jon also knew that Revik might very well believe every word he’d written to Allie in that letter, but still, in essence, be doing exactly what Balidor accused him of doing, consciously or not.
Revik didn’t see himself clearly, and that, in itself, was a problem.
If he really was affecting Allie’s light, like Balidor said, then she could start to fall into his warped view of the world, too. Hell, Jon had seen that happen with human couples, much less with seers. She could be affected by the Dreng, sure, but more likely, she might just find herself naturally sympathetic to Revik’s point of view.
That, and she loved him, of course.
So the argument made sense, from that perspective, and didn’t strike Jon as particularly surprising. She and Balidor had never exactly seen eye-to-eye when it came to Revik anyway.
Then, somewhere in that, Allie got well and truly pissed off.
Maybe she just made up her mind, and decided to throw her weight around as Bridge...something that, even Jon had to admit, she hadn’t done very often, even when she maybe should have. Maybe Balidor angered her by insinuating that she was being manipulated by Revik. He’d gotten nasty towards the end too, so maybe he just crossed the line with her in general. Maybe the crack about the collar really got to her.
Either way, at one point, it sounded like she actually fired Balidor as head of the Adhipan.
It also sounded like she was going back to Revik.
Then Balidor had a gun in his hand.
Before any of them could move, before it even really became real to Jon that the gun was real, that it wasn’t some kind of joke, or even a threat to get Allie to cooperate...the Adhipan leader shot Allie in the chest.
She’d gone down hard.
So hard, in fact, she cracked her head on the wooden stairs.
That, more than anything, had worried Jon horribly in those first few seconds. Not the hole in her chest that turned red within two of her heartbeats. Not the pool of blood that spread over the front of the cotton Chinese shirt she wore.
No, he’d been worried that she might have a concussion.
Standing over her, he’d watched her bleed, until it finally occurred to him he was watching his sister die.
But he didn’t have time to think about it for long.
Balidor and Dorje shuffled him out of the way before his mind caught up with any of it. They moved her out of there so quickly that Jon couldn’t comprehend what happened there, either.
He still didn’t know if they’d taken her somewhere to try and save her life...or if they’d buried her in the garden under those white-skinned trees.
All he knew was, when they came back, they said she was dead.
Jon also found out from Tenzin that what Balidor had done was strictly within the laws of the Seven and the Adhipan itself. The contingency for keeping the Bridge out of the hands of the Dreng was simple, but harsh...if it looked like she might go over, whether captured or converted, the party or parties responsible for her welfare were charged with killing her. In the logic of the Seven and the Adhipan, it was far more important to protect her light than it was to protect her physical body. The fact that they believed intermediaries like Allie reincarnated on Earth made it doubly important that her light remain free from negative influences.
According to Tenzin, Revik had been given that same contingency for Allie when he’d been assigned as her bodyguard back when Allie was a kid.
Which meant that, technically, Revik had been legally obligated to shoot her when Terian took her during their honeymoon.
There was a strict no-tolerance rule when it came to intermediary beings going to the dark side. Which was funny, in a non-funny kind of way...since from what Jon could tell, it happened rather a lot.
Before he could think about that for very long, someone was leading him by the arm out of the basement catacombs under the Old House. Looking back on it, Jon was fairly sure it had been Dorje, but he couldn’t have said that for sure, either.
Minutes later, all of them were in a truck, bouncing along a mountain road leading out of Seertown. Jon’s good hand gripped a metal bench in the back, and he’d been staring around at the rest of them, trying to see in their faces if they understood better than he did what had just happened. He looked between Cass and six other infiltrators and that giant, albino-looking boyfriend, and he felt like someone had cut a string that held him to the ground.
He’d seen Cass crying.
She’d been in shock too, when suddenly it broke. From her face, it was as if something had just occurred to her...or else that she finally understood what it all had meant. Her face crinkled under the scar that crossed it in a diagonal line...the same scar Terian gave her almost two years earlier.
Then Cass curled up in the lap of that giant seer with the big yellow braid and the faded brand of the sword and the sun on his shoulder. She cried for hours while he hel
d her. He rocked her with one massive, thick-fingered hand, saying something softly to her in that pidgin Mandarin he spoke and stroking her hair.
He still looked like some kind of mutant Viking to Jon.
She cried all the way to Hardiwar, and then, just as quickly, she seemed to fall asleep. Jon wondered if the giant had done that, too...maybe he felt it had been enough, at least for awhile.
Jon just watched them through it, and wondered what Balidor had done with the body.
They would have wanted to destroy it.
Not just bury it...but maybe set it on fire. Pour acid on it to dissolve the flesh, skin, bones, teeth. They’d want to leave nothing, just in case.
Just in case what, Jon couldn’t have said, either.
Supposedly you couldn’t clone an Elaerian. Their cells degenerated, even the DNA degenerated, shortly after being separated from the host body. Something about their light body being so entwined with the physical vessel...parts of their physical make up simply couldn’t hold together without the light part there, too.
Two other trucks remained in the parking area by the Old House on the Hill in Seertown. Balidor and the others stayed behind to finish whatever had to be done. Dorje came with them as far as Dharamsala, then he let them go, too. Jon had seen tears in his eyes when he said goodbye, but he remembered a promise in there somewhere, some words about finding him later.
Or not. Maybe Jon imagined that, too.
So far, it had been not...and Jon saw nothing to indicate it might change anytime in the near future.
It occurred to him, far before the time when the truck finally stopped, that he might never see Balidor again. The seer would probably go underground, or return to the Pamir, given that Revik’s whole army of rebels would want him dead.
He couldn’t really think about Dorje yet.
It even crossed his mind that Balidor and the infiltrators who disappeared following the shooting could have been working for someone else.
Allie's War Season Two Page 18